Media critic, novelist, and erstwhile prof to yours truly Doug Rushkoff is going to be a daddy. Congrats, DR!

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Between Randy Barnett’s recent paper and Will’s TCS piece on this subject, I’m thinking it may finally be time to clean up my undergrad senior thesis, Political Libertarianism, and post it.  Look for it early next week.

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I assess how the remake of The Manchurian Candidate, which opens tomorrow, measures up to the original.  Also, earlier this week, I made a brief case against creating a director of national intelligence.

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How did the center of the countryâ??the “heartland” or “flyover country” as you preferâ??get its status as the “authentic” America, as opposed to the inauthentically American coastal cities?  It certainly doesn’t make historical sense—the eastern seaboard was part of America first. They’re not some sort of “silent majority”—the demographic story of this century has been the urbanization of America; […]

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Just in case you aren’t going to be waiting at home (or in Boston) in rapt attention for John Kerry to speak tomorrow night, remember there’s a Blogorama at Rendezvous.  For those looking for the best (best?) of both worlds, we’ll try to keep a TV on the convention.

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At the risk of having to dodge tomatoes: Am I the only one who thought Barack Obama’s speech last night, while certainly quite strong, was scarcely remarkable, and that the fulsome praise it’s been getting has a just a whiff of “and he’s so articulate” syndrome about it?   In any event, if the lovefest gets […]

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A couple posts down, I took some brief shots at Ed Feser’s muddled farrago attacking liberal neutrality.  That piece does seem to have had at least one happy result, though: It prompted Will Wilkinson to pen a lucid and accessible brief introduction to Political Libertarianism, an approach I expect to be increasingly influential in coming […]

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Looks like the big news of the DNC isn’t Obama or Clinton, but the unveiling of formerly-pseudonymous liberal uberblogger Atrios as Bryn Mawr econ prof Duncan Black.  I’ll confess, I’d (perhaps rather unsportingly) IP-traced him to Bryn Mawr a while back and spent some time thumbing through faculty profiles trying to divine who he might […]

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Of the many handy notions that’ve stuck around in my head from a period in my mid-teens where I devoured everything I could find by Robert Anton Wilson, one of the most useful is the “Snark Principle”.  Borrowed from a line in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, the Snark Principle holds that “what […]

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A poster in my neighborhood for Nellie McKay’s debut album was trumpeting a reviewer‘s claim that she was “rooted in the taut, witty tradition linking Cole Porter, Elvis Costello and Eminem.” There’s a taut, witty tradition (I puzzled) linking Cole Porter, Elvis Costello, and Eminem? I was so intrigued I decided I had to hear […]

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